It was a question of steering Christian dogma between the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of materialism and its logical conclusion, scepticism.

Nobody who understands the amount of pain and energy which go to the creation of new instruments of thought can feel anything but respect for the philosophy of the Middle Ages.

We can only cope with the dangers of language if we recognize that language is by nature magical and therefore highly dangerous.

When a new thing or a new idea comes into the consciousness of the community, it is described, not by a new word, but by the name of the pre-existing object which most closely resembles it.

When any significant change takes place in the moral standards of a community, it is immediately reflected in a general shifting of the meanings of common words.

In the common words we use every day, souls of past races, the thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead, but frozen into their attitudes like the courtiers in the garden of the Sleeping Beauty.

When the velocity of progress increases beyond a certain point, it becomes indistinguishable from crisis.

There is no surer or more illuminating way of reading a man’s character, and perhaps a little of his past history, than by observing the contexts in which he prefers to use certain words.

The obvious is the hardest thing of all to point out to anyone who has genuinely lost sight of it.

As we see it, the whole outlook brought about by the scientific revolution should have been--must be--a phase, only, of the evolution of consciousness. An absolutely indispensable phase, but a passing one. What is riveting it on to us and preventing us from superseding it, because it prevents us from even imaging any other kind of consciousness, is precisely this error of projecting it back into the past.